Sept. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Shon Hopwood robbed five banks, went
to jail, learned law, wrote a petition that made it to the
Supreme Court, served his time, got out, got married, had kids
and is now in law school at the University of Washington on a
scholarship from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Much of the credit for “Law Man,” his fine, engrossing
memoir, no doubt goes to his co-writer, Dennis Burke. But a lot
of it goes to the material.

Entering prison at the age of 23, Hopwood felt dread mixed
with exhilaration: “Although I was scared, I wanted to see the
place and know that I could handle it -- that I could survive.”

This is what he found:

“If you had a summer camp for kids with extreme anger
management problems, and you took away most of the adults, added
weapons, and you didn’t let anyone go home for years and years,
you’d have a U.S. prison. It’s strictly ‘Lord of the Flies.’”

He did survive, through a mixture of intelligence (not
least about people) and fearlessness. Hopwood writes with a
humility free of meekness that is probably basic to his
personality. It must have helped him make friends -- and avoid
making enemies -- in the pen.

Unlike many prisoners, he still had the glimmer of a future
(his sentence was 12 years, of which he served nine and a half),
especially once he started getting letters from his high-school
crush.

Fast Learner

Pretty much out of happenstance, he wound up working in the
prison law library. He was a fast learner. (“It turns out,” he
writes of the correspondence courses he signed up for, “that
school is not so difficult if you actually read the
textbooks.”)

Chance also brought him a fellow prisoner who needed help
with a case that proved to be of great interest to the Supreme
Court, which not only accepted his petition but, in the end,
bought his argument.

Fellers v. United States involved the reading of Miranda
rights and the proper application of the Fifth and Sixth
Amendments.

Long Odds

“The Court, in fact, receives tens of thousands of
prisoner-written briefs,” Hopwood writes. It “usually grants
only about 1 percent of cases that are filed, and far, far less
than that for cases that are filed pro se, without the help of a
lawyer.”

He and Burke are very good at laying out the legal issues
and portraying prison life. But they leave a gap exactly where I
was most curious: How did a fledgling law librarian attain the
jurisprudential proficiency to argue a case so persuasively?

Only very briefly do we see Hopwood, or sense him, in the
process of learning. Maybe it would take a novelist’s skill to
render that kind of growth comprehensible. Otherwise, he and
Burke have come up with what must be the best possible version
of his voice.

That voice belongs to a confident, likable man who isn’t
trying to gloss over the idiocies of his past but who, much to
his surprise, has accomplished things it took going to prison to
find out he had it in him to achieve.

“Law Man: My Story of Robbing Banks, Winning Supreme Court
Cases and Finding Redemption” is from Crown (308 pages, $25.)
To buy this book in North America, click.

(Craig Seligman is a critic for Muse, the arts and leisure
section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

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